en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus
1 correction found
Cassius Dio states that Elagabalus was married to women five times (twice to the same woman).
This misstates both Cassius Dio and the usual count of Elagabalus’s female marriages. Dio says he married 'many women,' not 'five,' and modern scholarship commonly counts four marriages to women, with Aquilia Severa as both second and fourth wife.
Full reasoning
The sentence attributes a precise figure to Cassius Dio that Dio does not give in the cited passage. In the translated Dio excerpt used in teaching materials from the Classical Association, Dio says: "He married many women, and had intercourse with even more" — not that he married women five times.
Modern scholarly summaries of Elagabalus's marriages also usually count four marriages to women: Cornelia Paula, Aquilia Severa, Annia Faustina, and then Aquilia Severa again. A scholarly article on Elagabalus states: "Elagabalus married four times ... He finally remarried Aquilia Severa."
So the article's wording is inaccurate in two ways: it assigns a specific number to Cassius Dio that is not in Dio's text, and it overstates the count of Elagabalus's marriages to women. (A fifth 'marriage' sometimes discussed in later retellings involves a man, not an additional woman.)
2 sources
- Queering the Pasts, Chapter 2: Elagabalus (Classical Association)
The source excerpt from Cassius Dio reads: "He married many women, and had intercourse with even more ..."
- Otho, Elagabalus and The Judgement of Paris: the literary construction of the unmanly emperor
"Elagabalus married four times ... the first was Cornelia Paula ... the second ... Aquilia Severa ... He finally remarried Aquilia Severa."